You know things are going just great in crypto-land when a cryptocurrency company has to post a vague cease-and-desist letter to its own blog. Everything about this is bizarre, but it culminated in this very strange cease-and-desist blog post by Nexo. There is a separate blog post that sort of, but not quite, tries to […]
China is choked by surveillance. It’s everywhere and it touches every aspect of its citizens’ lives. The government uses it to stifle dissent, control the population, and persecute undesirables. Law enforcement has been doing pre-crime for years, but China’s version is amped up and all-consuming. “Guilty until forever” is the guideline in China, where massive […]
Users are juggling huge amounts of data, so it makes sense that you’re taking care of that data responsibly. With Degoo you get up to 50TB of secured storage space from which to manage and share files with simplicity. With high-speed transfers, you’ll love how easy it is to keep tabs on all of your […]
We’ve written about Rappler, the very successful Filipino investigative news organization founded by reporter Maria Ressa, multiple times over the past few years. Rappler was very critical of the Rodrigo Duterte administration, but it’s reporting was solid. Back in 2018, the Filipino SEC announced that it was going to shut down Rappler, in a move […]
A week or two ago we noted how there was a mass panic because TikTok was found to be sharing U.S. user data with executives at the company’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. This was in stark contrast to the strict, U.S.-based data management controls the company claimed to be implementing, and, to be clear, was […]
In April, Donald Trump insisted he had no interest whatsoever in getting back on Twitter (in response to questions about whether or not Elon Musk would allow him back, should he ever close his Twitter purchase). In May, Donald Trump lost his lawsuit trying to force Twitter to reinstate him. In June, Donald Trump (who […]
Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible: Amazon owned Audible ceased selling individual audiobooks through their Android app from Google Play a couple of weeks ago. This will prevent anyone from buying […]
The terrible, awful, no good, horrible plans to regulate the internet keep coming faster and furiouser these days. So, it’s worth remembering a time back when Congress passed one of the worst laws about the internet: the Communications Decency Act. Yes, these days we talk about the CDA more reverently, but that’s only because we’re […]
The world can be an awful, horrible place. Lately, it feels like, in America, things are only getting more difficult. And, because my country loves its scapegoats, the internet has been routinely blamed for all the country’s, perhaps the world’s, ills. Insurrections, political radicalization, obesity, poor socialization, literally any sub-optimal thing to do with children: […]
I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills that are likely to hurt, or at least not help, kids. Today’s example is AB 2273, the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AADC), Before we get […]
The Ultimate Excel VBA Bundle and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021 for Windows will take you from Excel beginner to expert in no time. Over 13 courses, you’ll learn how to use Excel VBA to do a variety of tasks: how to create your first macro from scratch, how to control mouse and keyboard commands, […]
Israeli phone malware manufacturer NSO Group has plenty of customers. Or at least it did until the Israeli government edited the company’s list of approved customers and the US government slapped sanctions on it. NSO has sold its malware to plenty of abusive governments with long histories of human rights violations. It has also sold […]
As we’ve discussed before, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really does not like the “actual malice” standard required to make a defamation claim against a public figure, as laid out in the extremely important NY Times v. Sullivan case. The actual malice standard confuses many people, because it’s not actually about malice. The standard is […]
On the one hand, content moderation at the scale modern social media companies operate at is an impossible nightmare. Companies are always going to lack the staff and resources to do it well (raising questions about the dangers of automation at scale), and they’re always going to screw things up for reasons well discussed. At […]
Donald Trump promised to take the social media world by storm with his Truth Social Twitter-clone for the MAGA world. “Free speech!” he claimed as he banned anyone who criticized him. Of course, from the beginning, many suspected that this was all a very sketchy grift, using a SPAC to try to cash in on […]
Late last year we discussed a plainly stupid trademark lawsuit brought by Dairy Queen, which makes tasty frozen snacks, and W.B. Mason which is a strange combination of furniture and grocery store. At issue was the latter’s attempt to trademark some bottled water it sells under the brand “Blizzard Water”. Notably, W.B. Mason had sold […]
Ever since it came into effect, we’ve been calling out how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was an obviously problematic bit of legislation. In the four years since it’s gone into effect, we’ve seen nothing to change that opinion. For users, it’s been a total nuisance. Rather than take the big US internet […]
The Internet of things — aka the tendency to bring Internet connectivity to devices whether they need them or not — has provided no shortage of both tragedy and comedy. “Smart” locks that are easy to bypass, “smart” fridges that leak your email credentials, or even “smart” barbies that spy on toddlers are all pretty […]
As we see more and more western countries looking to regulate the internet in order to stifle speech they dislike, we’ve noted how much these efforts seem to be almost directly modeled on how China censors the internet. You might think that would be a reason to run in the other direction, but too many […]
I had to rewrite this post before it got published. I originally began it with some whimsy in response to the absurdity that copyright cases like these always engender. The idea that people could ever use their rights in previous expression to forbid someone else’s subsequent expression is almost too absurd to take seriously as […]
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